Guided, flailing Inquiry

I am Luke Steere, and honored to be a guest blogger for 52GID. After getting over the sheer terror of accidentally telling students to “immerse in databases” during the Explore stage or “explore options for projects” during the Create phase, I realized the very essence of GID is about validating feelings and difficulties, and I should be demonstrating uncertainty as much as I am requiring my students to. A realization which followed: GID is an important framework not just for projects, but for driving a school’s culture toward inquiry and meta-learning.

My experience with GID began as part of an observation of the Westborough High School library for a master’s course in 2016. It looked like this: I am in the WHS library nodding knowingly with an inward ignorance, as millennials will, with the overly confident feeling that everything being said by SLT Anita Cellucci, whom I am interviewing, and who is using acronyms such as GID, ISP, and IEP, could later be searched on the web. And I write the acronyms feverishly (my last career: journalist). And my understanding of those acronyms in the moment had little-to-no bearing on info I was wont to get, having done a few other ‘15 hour’ observations for my master’s already. “Uhhh— cool! So what’s your annual budget? … And how many things— err items— in your collection?” If only I knew…

But I did just that, the web stuff, and checked out this blog. And boy did I have follow-up questions with which to pester her. And, more importantly, I knew where I would want to go for my high school practicum site because, frankly, I was blown away by All the colors of GID (which you can go and read, right now, on this very blog). So it was no surprise I would pick Anita as my practicum supervisor, with the hope of learning more about GID, and over the last five months I have been working alongside her and dipping my toe into the learning method. And using it (selfishly) as a sort of fun little distraction from all the paperwork the Department of Elementary and Secondary Ed. requires.

Yes— fun distraction. I mean, I know teaching is fun, but GID has a knack for imbuing it with a renewed sense of purpose and direction. No more teeth grinding about collaboration with a teacher who is assigning student topics or projects— the push for student choice is built in. I should mention here that I was one of those teachers: during my practicum I taught full time as an English Teacher and Librarian at the Hillside School: an all-boys boarding operation about 15 minutes from Westborough. I live there in a dorm on campus.

So, I took what I learned from the social, emotional tutelage of Anita and her guidance through a remarkable project with a Psychology and Lit teacher named Kathy Stoker and went back to my job for the Spring Term. “Hello, may I have one-and-a-half to two weeks of your class time for a cool project?” What could go wrong?

Luke Steere

English Teacher and Librarian at the Hillside School

Massachusetts